The old joke goes like this: A tourist stops a New Yorker on the street and asks “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The local pauses for a minute and then replies “practice, practice, practice…”

Well, the world class Detroit Symphony Orchestra must have been practicing. They were in Carnegie Hall last night with a full house, including 628 fellow Detroiters waiving DSO hankies and rooting for them like they were the Tigers. It was a wonderful night in the Hall. Maestro Leonard Slatkin entered the stage to a thunderous ovation and led the orchestra in Rachmaninoff’s Caprice Bohemien and the Isle of the Dead, then Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins and finally, Maurice Ravel’s La Valse.

The performance was part of the Spring for Music initiative, which enables American orchestras to explore creative programs in New York City without typical marketing and financial constraints (click here to read a Washington Post article about Spring for Music). Chaired by Miami’s leading classical patron Dan Lewis, Spring for Music has attracted some great orchestras and made a trip to Manhattan to see them perform in Carnegie Hall, a mandatory road trip for hometown orchestra lovers.

DSO rehearsal at Carnegie Hall

Rocco Landesman once said, “Why don’t we treat our major cultural organizations like sports teams and root for them in the same way?” Last night that is exactly what happened with the heavily pro-Detroit audience. Go DSO! Click here and here to listen to the performances.